Wikispeed: How A 100 mpg Car Was Developed In 3 Months

What if the car you drove to work every day got 100 mpg? Joe Justice and his Wikispeed team have developed a functional prototype. Using Agile radical management methods, their prototype was developed in just three months, instead of the multi-year process that traditional manufacturing requires.

Other notable facts? The car can go from 0 to 60 mph in less than five seconds. It weighs just 1,404 pounds. It has a top speed of 149 mph. Its ground clearance can be adjusted anywhere from racing to sport utility.

By day, Justice is a young software consultant in the Seattle area. But he is also the leader of the international Team Wikispeed, which is now building a fast, affordable, ultra-efficient, safe, fun commuter car that should sell for less than $20,000. The team is seeking "crowd-funding" through indiegogo.

How did a software consultant like Justice get involved in building radically innovative cars with such a rapid development cycle? In 2008, Justice saw the announcement of the Progressive Insurance X Prize—a $10 million prize aimed at seeing if it was even possible to build 100 mpg cars to road-legal safety specifications. In 2008, the closest thing to that looked like bob-sleds—economic but not practical. They achieved 100 miles per gallon but they only held one occupant and didn’t meet safety standards.

Justice decided to enter the X-Prize challenge. In the beginning, he was alone. But he blogged about what he was doing and what he was learning. Through social networking tools, volunteers learned about it and came to assist. Three months later, he had a team of 44 members in four countries and functioning prototype that they entered in the X-Prize competition. With practically no funding and little experience in auto manufacture, they tied for tenth place in the mainstream class, outlasting more than one hundred other cars from well-funded companies and universities around the world.

Wikispeed’s secret sauce: Agile

The Wikispeed team achieved all this by developing the car like modern software teams using the radical management methods of Agile, Lean and Scrum. This approach enabled the team to innovate much more quickly than conventional manufacturing.

Existing manufacturing processes are slow because they are very expensive to change. If an engineer wants to redesign a door, they need to wait ten years to pay off the $100 million door mold before making another one. It’s not uncommon for manufacturing teams to run on 10 year development cycles.

Traditional software development used to be done exactly the same way. Large software companies with teams of narrow specialists worked in dedicated facilities, going through many years of planning and implementation to produce something that might or might not come close what they had hoped to build back when they started, years before.

Agile software development changed all that. Working in short cycles, self-organizing teams work in a modular fashion and continually innovate in the light of experience and customer feedback.

It’s hardly surprising that Justice adopted Agile methods when he came to build a car: he didn’t know anything else. His first job out of college was an Agile software shop, and his second job focused on Agile teams. When the car project started he didn't know another way of prioritizing work or solving complex problems.

Adapting Agile to auto manufacture

Nevertheless translating software team best practices to hardware was a challenge. He had to answer questions like: What does an "automated test" look like for a seat belt? What is "inheritance" applied to a chassis? What does "contract first development" look like for an airbag system? But by overcoming these challenges the entire team has been able to become fluent in the principles of agile management practices.

Wikispeed has more in common with Salesforce [CRM], Google [GOOG] and Twitter than with GM or Chrysler. Traditional manufacturing or software teams gather requirements, design the solution, build the solution, test the solution, then deliver the solution. In existing automotive companies, the design portion of that process alone takes many years, and then the vehicle design is built for 5 to 14 years. This means it is possible to buy a brand new car from a dealer and that car represents the engineering team's understanding of what the customer wanted, several decades ago.

Team Wikispeed follows the model of Agile software teams, using 1 week "sprints". The team iterates the entire car every 7 days. That means every 7 days they re-evaluate each part of the car and re-invent the next highest priority aspects. This radically accelerates the pace of development.

A drastic reduction in development time and cost

Right after the X-Prize, in January 2011, the Wikispeed Team was invited to the large auto show in Detroit Michigan. They knew they needed a more beautiful car. But they also knew that a new car body would cost at least $36,000 and three months’ lead time. The team didn’t have the money or the time. So Justice took time off his day job and he went to composite school. He came back to the team and made small models of the car. They iterated a composites process that ended up building the car body in structural carbon fiber in three days at a cost of $800.

Their car was put on the main floor of the auto show between Ford [F] and Chevrolet [GM]. Lucky for them, the car was beautiful. The car was duly featured on the Discovery Channel, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, the New York Times [NYT], the National Geographic Channel, Wired magazine. Forbes Billionaire Club linked to them.

Agile manufacturing

Justice explains that the key to speed is being modular. The engine can be switched from a gasoline engine to an electric engine in the time it normally takes to change a tire. The car body switches from a convertible to a pickup truck. This enables quick development. The chassis holds all the modules together: it’s the lightest chassis in the world to achieve a five-star crash rating equivalency.

The car is safe because the team designs safety tests for the all the car’s parts before they are made. They take this practice from test-driven development in the software world.

The team reduces the cost of making changes wherever possible—costs in tooling machinery and complexity. This means they don’t have to wait three to seven years for the next version of their product: they are able to make changes to any part of the car every seven days.

They use distributed collaborative teams. This helps increase team velocity. Morale is a multiplier for morale across the team. They organize their teams using Scrum.

They do all their work in pairs. This avoids time spent in training that’s not productive. It drastically reduces the need for documentation. The people doing the work share knowledge while working, without having to up-train someone afterwards.

The tools they use are free, like FreeConferenceCall.com, Dropbox, GoogleDocs, YouTube, Skydrve, Facebook and LinkedIn. None of these tools existed ten years ago.

Fund raising for Wikispeed

Justice is now seeking "crowd-funding" to turn his prototype into a marketable product. He is wary about seeking traditional venture capital as this could push the endeavor into commercial short-term money-making, when Justice’s real aspirations are more towards changing the world and making it more environmentally sustainable. So he is pursuing instead crowd-funding through indiegogo.com.

The goal is to take the functional road-going prototypes as the launchpad to bring ultra-efficient, modular cars to the world with the 100 mpg Comfortable Commuter Car, the Wikispeed C3. Justice aims to deliver the C3 as a complete car for $17,995 and as a kit for $10,000.

Wikispeed now has 150 team members in 15 countries to help get this done. They have working prototypes of each part that makes up the ultra efficient, ultra-low emissions, gasoline powered C3. The car is designed and manufactured in eight parts. They now need funding to enhance each piece from a prototype to a production-ready part.

They have just started crowd-funding with a two-month time-frame to raise around $50,000. Their deadline is July 12, 2012. More information is available here.

Implications for manufacturing

Whatever happens to the Team Wikispeed project, the implications of these radical management methods for manufacturing are revolutionary. The ability to drastically reduce the development time for new models and innovate more rapidly amounts to a phase change--another sign of the shift to the Creative Economy. It has the potential to transform not just the auto industry but every kind of manufacturing.